Monthly Archives: June 2019

320 million years ago, New Mexico was a shallow tropical sea studded with large islands. These were the peaks of the Ancestral Rocky Mountains, formed when Africa collided with North America and compressed the Earth’s crust in the New Mexico area. Blocks of crust were forced upwards by the compression...Read more

My first crack at this trail ended badly when I realized my camera wasn’t focusing properly. Repairs were not entirely successful and I ended up with a new camera. A subsequent attempt ran out of time. This time I had the whole afternoon, a working camera, and flawless weather. But...Read more

I’ve been to the Harding Mine three times before. The first was as a middle-school kid, for a science field trip, which is one of the great happy memories of my childhood. I still have some good specimens from that trip. The second was around nine years ago, with Bruce...Read more

It’s been a while since I spent some serious time hiking in the Sierra de los Valles, the range of mountains west of Los Alamos that is also the east rim of the Valles caldera. This is not an area to hike during thunderstorm season, but the forecast was for...Read more